Tuesday, June 14, 2011

And Away We Go!

We're putting together this summer's planning trip, supported by a grant from the Trust for Mutual Understanding and our grand backers on Kickstarter. The map above shows our tour around Ukraine and the cities we'll stop at. We'll be traveling mostly by train which also allows for some opportunities to make a few stops along the way in towns and villages. In Kyiv, Donetsk, L'viv, and Odessa, we'll be meeting with organizations to plan our food conversations in the fall as well as learning a bit about their work and their communities.

But everywhere we go, we hope to talk about, eat, photograph, think about, share, and experience food. We're interested in small-scale, community and family food practices, including kitchen gardens, orchards, home food preparation, foraging, gathering and storage. We're interested in understanding more about how rural food practices are adapted within urban settings.We want to learn about what makes one region of Ukraine different from another, foodwise, and explore how Ukraine's many different ethnic groups continue their own distinct food traditions while melding them within a larger culture.

If you're in Ukraine or have friends or family in Ukraine that you think we should visit with, please just respond in the comments or email us (see at right). And of course there will be posts and photos all along the way.

Want a presentation about the Pickle Project? We might (given the peripatetic nature of both our jobs) be in your town. If you'd like to host a presentation or conversation--get in touch!

About Us

We're Linda Norris and Sarah Crow and we both like food. This is The Pickle Project, an ongoing effort to document and share traditional foodways in communities large and small throughout Ukraine as a way of understanding issues of sustainability, change and community.

Why Ukraine? We both spent time there as Fulbright Scholars. Sarah worked in the Carpathians on issues of forestry and sustainability and Linda, based in Kyiv, worked with museums throughout the country.

Why pickles? We've both had a long-standing interest in food as an expression of culture. And in Ukraine, pickled everything serves as a visible, important expression of culture.